Saturday, July 30, 2011

Boehner's Non-Cuts

Timothy Birdnow

Does Boehner's new debt reduction plan actually cut spending?

Nope.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/boehners-new-plan-doesnt-cut-spending/

According to the article:

"Actually, the revised Boehner plan doesn’t cut spending at all. The chart shows the discretionary spending caps in the new Boehner plan. Spending increases every year—from $1.043 trillion in 2012 to $1.234 trillion in 2021. (These figures exclude the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

The “cuts” in the Boehner plan are only cuts from the CBO baseline, which is an assumed path of constantly rising spending. If Congress wanted to, it could require CBO to increase its “baseline” spending by, say, $5 trillion over the next decade. Then Boehner could claim that he was “cutting” spending by $5.9 trillion, even though his plan hadn’t changed. You can see that discretionary “cuts” against baselines don’t mean anything.

The way to make real spending cuts is to abolish programs and agencies. But it’s been eight months since a landslide election that focused on the issue of spending cuts, and the Republican leadership hasn’t proposed any major terminations."

End excerpt.

More smoke-and-mirrors from this Speaker who I believe doesn't want to cut anything. Boehner is reacting to the political climate, and little more; he wants to return to business as usual, to the easy life of membership in the ultimate gentleman's club.

And as for the elites in the GOP telling us to take half a loaf, it isn't half a loaf at all; it is no loaf. It is not "a good start"; that was what we were told during the budget battle six months ago, and Boehner and the other GOP leaders said they were going to make their stand here, at the debt ceiling. We were told that the budget battle was a good start, and Boehner expressed surprise when he "learned" his budget deal cut only a couple of MILLION dollars. Well, SHAZAM! And now we are being fed more fertilizer.

What the elites - and that includes Laura Ingraham, who went on a tirade on her program yesterday about Tea Partiers demanding accountability from the people they put into office - fail to understand is that the public is fed up with "business as usual" and with deal making. We've had it with deal making. We are endlessly told that politics is about compromise. Yet it is our side that always compromises; we have been deal-made to death. This has gone on for decades. No matter how much we deliver the GOP always says they need more. We gave them control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, yet the liberal agenda still continued to advance. Once these guys get into office the desire to be liked and to have an easy time of it turns them into jellyfish. And people like Boehner then betray our wishes with smoke-and-mirrors, making it look like they are trying to do something when they are not.

It's crunch time; the Republic is at cliff's edge. Always we were able to put these things off, kick the can down the road, but we have run out of road and if we fail to clean up the mess we have made this nation will perish. These are not idle comments. The public intuitively understands that we have reached land's end, and the public wants something done now. The games must end, yet both sides continue to play by the old rules.

A "good start" is not good enough. We need to force the One against the spending cap. There has to be forced austerity; this government cannot continue as it is. This is about the survival of the Republic, not about scoring political points.

That is what the elites cannot seem to grasp. This isn't just another political game.